[MatthTheGeek]

Homeworld: Blue Planet
Demo Release

This is it ! After about 2 years of on-and-off progress, I am proud to present you the first demo release for Homeworld: Blue Planet.

This demo features:

- All capital ships operated at the time of Blue Planet on the GTVA Terran and UEF sides, aside from the Sanctus.
- One basic deathmatch map.
- A fully-functional Gauntlet gametype directly inspired from HW@'s Survival gametype, with two maps.
- A Massive Battle map for teh lulz.

DOWNLOAD LINKS:

Mediafire part 1
Mediafire part 2

ModDB mirror

FSMods.net mirror


Read Me contents:

Code: [Select]

===== INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS =====

- Make sure your Homeworld2 install is patched to v1.1.
- Copy HWBPDemo1.0.big to your Homeworld2/Data/ folder.
- Create a shortcut to your Homeworld2/Bin/Release/Homeworld2.exe
- In Properties, Target, add: -mod HWBPDemo1.0.big
- Start the game from the shortcut

You can also add -hardwarecursor -windowed -w 1920 -h 1080 to your shortcut if you wish, with your own screen resolution.

======= IMPORTANT NOTES ========

HWBP is fairly resource intensive, probably more than your average HW2 mod.

Because of improved shaders, and several textures larger than 2048², HWBP won't work on old or integrated cards.

Because the AI is still unreliable, it is recommended to play in Gauntlet mode.

========= KNOWN ISSUES =========

GAMEPLAY
- The UEC Sanctus isn't in the demo because it hasn't been converted yet. I was planning to wait for a HTL remake of that ship, but isn't going to be finished in time for the demo release.

- Beam damage might not be entirely faithful to BP stats yet because the FSO engine and HW2 engine both treat beam damage in their own, weird and entirely different ways.

- Some ships sometimes won't fire their missiles despite being in range of their target(s).

- Not all capital ships have engine subsystems because I am a noob and can't model.

- The UED Solaris spawns with mass drivers instead of having to build them.

- Missile interception balance is not definitive.

- Building times and costs aren't definitive.

- AI is still unreliable.

MISCELLANEOUS
- Not all effects are definitive.

- Not all ships have death markers, which means that death fx occur at the center of the dying ship instead of all along its surface.

- Sometimes thrusters and navlights don't appear on some ships. It seems to happen when the ship appear while you're in the sensor manager.


=========== CREDITS ============

HWBP Team members

- MatthTheGeek: Main modder, converter, hoder and stuff.

- pecenipicek: shader support, and simply for being there when I needed him.

Special thanks to:

- Darius and the Blue Planet team, for building this awesome extension to the Freespace universe, and giving us a great story and excellent missions to play with.

- The Freespace Upgrade team, for various models, textures and effects used, and for bringing our favourite space shooter back to today's visual standards.

- The Freespace Source Code Project, for offering us always more possibilities.

- The Hard-Light Productions community, for keeping Freespace alive, for finding me a little corner of web to show my stuff on, and for their support.

- The Homeworld: @ Team, for letting me use some of their effects and scripts, and for their support.

- Volition and Relic, for making the great games we all love.

EDIT: if you have issues running HW2 on recent OSes, have a look at this post.

[Polpolion]

sweet, need to grab my hw2 disc when I get the chance

[yuezhi]

awesome, its out.

now where can i get HW2. legally.

[MatthTheGeek]

Amazon, maybe ?

Homeworld 2 is abandonware. You won't find legal copies easily.

[jg18]

A quick search of eBay and Amazon suggests that HW2 is fairly easy to get legally and relatively cheap.

[General Battuta]

unf unf unf

[Garfield]

Awesome, downloading now!

[Eratharon]

I will be able to play this next month because a gamer magazine GameStar will be giving it out as a full game where I live (Hungary). Can't wait.

[mjn.mixael]

[aeon48m]

 
dlling now

[Mikes]

Someone write GoG that they are still missing an essential game in their catalogue!

[Aesaar]

This is goddamn brilliant.  You are awesome.

Beam damage might not be entirely faithful to BP stats yet because the FSO engine and HW2 engine both treat beam damage in their own, weird and entirely different ways.

IIRC, HW2 Ion beam damage value is the damage done over a single shot, spread out over the duration in seconds.  HW2 only starts counting recharge rate after the shot is done, so wouldn't beam damage be the same if you plugged in the damage per pulse and beam lifetimes (available on the wiki) in the appropriate fields?

I still have no idea how FS2 calculates beam damage, but HW2 was fairly intuitive (though the numbers in the weapon file were not labelled).

You probably thought about this, I'm just interested in why it doesn't work.

[Droid803]

I still have no idea how FS2 calculates beam damage...

FS2 beam damage per pulse (DPP) is approx Damage x Lifetime x [Beam Damage Rate Constant] (BDRC).
Where BDRC is approximately 5.5 for 1x time compression, and varies with time compression, maxing at somewhere around 8x IIRC, then dropping in efficiency when compared to 1x afterwards.
Kind of stupid, because time compression can actually break battles where beams are involved as going to high time compression makes it so that beams barely do any damage per pulse whereas everything else scales properly.

[pecenipicek]

This is goddamn brilliant.  You are awesome.

Beam damage might not be entirely faithful to BP stats yet because the FSO engine and HW2 engine both treat beam damage in their own, weird and entirely different ways.

IIRC, HW2 Ion beam damage value is the damage done over a single shot, spread out over the duration in seconds.  HW2 only starts counting recharge rate after the shot is done, so wouldn't beam damage be the same if you plugged in the damage per pulse and beam lifetimes (available on the wiki) in the appropriate fields?

I still have no idea how FS2 calculates beam damage, but HW2 was fairly intuitive (though the numbers in the weapon file were not labelled).

You probably thought about this, I'm just interested in why it doesn't work.

slasher beams arent exactly doable in HW2, hence the beam damage iffyness and the fact that the deimos was a whole lot more deadly than it was supposed to be for a long time during development.

[Aesaar]

Right.  Forgot about slashers.  Hmm.

[MatthTheGeek]

Yup, there's the issue about slashers, but also the fact that after a lot of testing I found that HW2 beam damage looks like it's the damage spread over the duration of the beam, but it actually tends to be significantly variable depending on what you're shooting it at. In particular, it can vary in ranges of +/- 20% depending on the health of the target. It's very weird. I suppose it's a genuine bug in the HW2 engine.

In any case, I need to do more tests on both FSO and HW2 until I successfully manage to accurately emulate the correct beam behavior.

[crizza]

DAmn...I can't find a damn Homeworld2 patch -.-

[Darius]

I just googled and downloaded one literally 2 minutes ago. Look harder!

[crizza]

Damn shame, you're right and I got a hangover, so I'm lazy as hell...
Now I'll dig up my HW2 disc and here we go.

[Master_Drow]

Saddening. Homeworld 2 does not work with the newest Mac OS, and I was looking forward to this.